The topic of this volume is the nature and evaluation of reasoning in science and mathematics. Science and mathematics can both be understood as proceeding by a method of abstraction from experience. Mathematics is distinguished from other sciences only in its greater abstraction and its demand for necessity in its inferences.

The topic of this volume is prescriptive reasoning: why to view prescriptions as true or false and how to reason with them; in what way a theory can be prescriptive; and how descriptions of rationality are prescriptive.